At the beginning of the 1950s, he was one of many young men who shipped off to Korea, fighting a war half a world from his home in Georgia. After the war ended in 1953 and his three sons — one of whom is disabled — finished school, he moved with his wife, Earnestine, to Birmingham, Ala., to care for his grandparents. There, he was embraced by his neighbors, for whom he often cut the grass — even at 85 years old — to keep the neighborhood looking tidy...

On Wednesday, neighbors alerted Stanley, a neighbor and relative of Dacus’s, that they smelled smoke and saw fire coming from the back yard of Dacus’s house. They thought maybe his RV had caught fire, or that someone had set fire to it — police said witnesses had seen a young black man running through a nearby alleyway with a red gasoline jug.

Stanley sent his son to investigate.

But the camper wasn’t on fire. What he found was far more shocking and horrifying.

It was Dacus’s body, in the back yard of the home he lived in for more than 50 years, engulfed in flames.

Eighteen year old Thomas Sims, an African-American, has been arrested and charged with the murder.

Birmingham has a high crime rate compared to most other cities in the nation. Life is especially difficult for the elderly, who can't protect themselves.

Yet it's worth examining how Dacus would be viewed by the Great and the Good in our society today. He was a white Southerner, a class of people who it is not only permitted to hate, but who are practically demonized. He was a combat veteran, a group the SPLC and others have portrayed as a threat. He was a white male and therefore "privileged" and incapable of being oppressed.

He fought for this country, came home, and then his government did the best it could to make his life a living hell for him and everyone like him. And he ended his days being slaughtered and set ablaze.